Fleeting Moments
by Spykee
Summary: For Ultear, there was life after death, or a semblance of it. Yet all was not well in her eternity of solitude. One-shot of Ultear in the time rifts contemplating her existence and the punishment that she lived until she found the one person that could pierce the veil of her lonely existence for a few fleeting moments on the battle field. Rated T for implied death & depression.


**Fleeting Moments**

Time was… Time was a lot of things to Ultear Milkovich. A curse, a blessing, a future, a past and an opportunity. Time was supposed to be her salvation, her second chance, her hope. And in a way, maybe it had been.

Time, to Ultear, had always been something she could control, a safety mechanism, her weaponry of choice as well as a tool with which she would fix all that was wrong in her life. She handled time like the wind handled the leaves, like the moon handled the waves. Time was a second nature to her and she felt that so long as she would not lose her grasp on time, she would stay in control of her life. Because eventually, eventually everything that happened was subject to time. Victims of time, or collateral damage. Time, when given full control, would stop at nothing to sweep away everything. Time could break down the tallest mountains and dry up the deepest trenches of the oceans. And the only thing stronger than time were those who controlled it.

Close to the ending of her life, Ultear realized that maybe there was no such power.

Or maybe there was, and Ultear just did not possess it.

In the end, time had taken Ultear, in more senses than one. Wandering the rifts of time, an eternity outside of eternity, a place within time itself, where time did not exist, yet it was everything, here Ultear was one with time. She felt it in her bones and in her soul. Like she could drift on the seconds that ticked by as if it were her lifeboat, sitting between the life she'd led and the death she'd escaped, or that had been taken away from her.

Ultear wasn't quite so sure yet how she felt about the shadow world for her alone. Her own imprisonment, gifted to her for trying to defy the all-powerful dynamics of time. For one, she felt like she had finally won, because in a place where there is no time and time is everything and everywhere, it did not have power over Ultear. It could not tear her down there were it could not reach her, there where it was everything.

Time finally stopped to control her, and with it, she'd found some semblance of control back.

She lived, though separated from the flows of time by a thin veil that kept her from reality, in the happiest moments of her life continuously, endlessly. Because when time was nothing and it was everything, who's to say where and when she was. Anytime and no-time. She'd lived in the present, too, or their present, a present. Watched over Meredy, Jellal, Gray. She'd gone further ahead and further back in time than her time-obsessed child-self would have ever been able to imagine, or will ever be able to imagine.

But a time-less eternity living vicariously through the happiness of others, even if that other was yourself beyond the veil -another self, it was torture of it's own kind.

And Ultear had found herself whispering in the emptiness of nothing, the displacement of nowhere, the fleeting moments of a heartbeat, that she'd wished she would not be punished to spend her eternal drifting, be it in her lifeboat or on the ticking of a clock, alone.

Even when there is no time, there is progression, and somewhere along that progression Ultear had found herself enjoying the happiness of her happiness less and less. Perhaps it was the life force being drained from her by hours that weren't hours, years that weren't years, by progression. Instead she sought out other types of entertainment, or torment. Thought if she reminded herself that the world was cruel and hurtful, that perhaps she would not miss it as much.

Yet despite her findings she yearned for that what time could give her no longer which was someone, something, to spend the passage with. The passage of progression, the aging of her soul. When one time per chance, call it luck or divinity or cruel fate perhaps, she wandered upon the one thing that would tempt her with both the reachability of being within the grasp of time itself as well as being untouchable. Attainable but not quite, like a gift handed to her but kept just out of her reach. A woman that perhaps played with time like it could but ought not to be played with, the way Ultear did it too. She couldn't quite remember the when and where of it, if she'd ever even known at all when she'd been as she'd watched the carnage unfold on the battlefield. Dimaria was a force to be reckoned with and Ultear was captivated not only by her beauty but by her ruthlessness, her fearlessness. Terrifyingly entrancing, yet so hideous Ultear's fingers itched to touch, her, it, the remnants of whatever it was when it lingered on the battlefield that was her, a goddess of death.

A goddess of everything that Ultear had once wanted to have been, masterfully playing time like an instrument, not entirely unlike she'd once done, will once do, still does, maybe somehere, some time.

A daunting new torture arose for Ultear to dwell on in her isolation from everything and forever. Where she would reach and reach but it was all for naught because whereas her prison of time was inescapable, it proved not untouchable, for, some time along progression, Dimaria could and would and might reach back and pierce the veil that tore Ultear from existence, unhinge the lock on Ultear's chains of solitude in the darkness.

She had and forever will play with the idea to go back in time, their time, or Ultear's progression, to watch again the destruction of Dimaria, goddess of eternity. Yet her curiosity and her forever of no-time left her wanting to touch, to taste, to pierce. She trailed the goddess the way she had trailed time it self when she lived: wondering if perhaps somewhere along the line, some-when along the progression of time and Dimaria's life, she would reach it, reach her. Hoping for an encounter, for whatever she could have that was not nothing, not everything. A crossroads, an intersection of timeless and all the time. A goddess and a slave of time. A puppet and a puppeteer. Praying that Dimaria's mastery, her captivating wielding of time not weaponized but practiced, might at some point, some-when and somewhere, for a few fleeting moments be Ultears one way out.

For mere fleeting moments, perhaps the veil could be pierced and time could be mastered.

For a few fleeting moments, Dimaria might be her salvation, her second chance and her hope.


End file.
